Reinventing American Literary History

Although the title of their 1986 Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America “announces a relatively new field of inquiry,” Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia are quick to remind readers that “the work of inventing America is older than Columbus” (vii). Inventing America has, indeed, been the undertaking of centuries as well as the subject of many books, notably Edmundo O’Gorman’s 1961 The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. However, reinventing the Americas is a different proposition entirely. To reinvent the Americas for Chevigny and Laguardia is to bring literary works of different parts of the Americas into contact and, in so doing, to throw the inner workings of invention into stark relief. Reinvention draws attention to the landmass that is the Americas and to the rhetorical incoherencies that have emerged through reference to it. Bringing the Americas into contact is not so much about comparing its component parts as about producing new divisions—new parsings of the past, new lines of demarcation, and trajectories of indebtedness. In short, reinvention does not repeat the process of invention so much as reveal invention’s complex underpinnings, internal inconsistencies, and latent constructedness. In this way reinvention is the repetition of invention with a key difference—it does not compare but rather divides nations along new axes.

It is this approach to the literary and cultural traditions of the Americas that characterizes much recent work in US-American studies. Concerned with the points of overlap, mutual imbrication, and engagement between different nations and seemingly divergent literary traditions, US literary scholars have undertaken to reinvent the terrain of literary study. Such reinvention reveals the complex multiform layers of cultural engagement and opposition that can characterize literary texts and traditions. Rodrigo Lazo’s study of the flow of filibustering literature between the US and Cuba, Susan Gillman’s analysis of José Martí’s 1887 translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Indian reform novel Ramona (1884), and Anna Brickhouse’s analysis of a hemispheric rather than nation-based literature of Jamestown, for example, exemplify how scholars are reconstellating the field of US literary studies. As these studies suggest, some of the most innovative scholarly work is orienting US literary history so that national exceptionalism and literary nationalism yield to literary origins stories that reach across rather than reinforce national divides. Such work is less concerned with comparison—indeed, it does not assume that there are two cohesive literatures to compare—but rather focuses on points of convergence and synergy. Rather than locating the Puritans within and against European culture, for example, such work might bring into view the Puritans’ interest in creating a Puritan continent through Mexico, and Cotton Mather’s decision to study Spanish so he could evangelize Latin America.

Given its far-sightedness, it is surprising that Reinventing the Americas has not more often been identified as a founding text of transnational or hemispheric American studies. Co-edited by a Latin-American and a US-American literary scholar, the collection exemplifies area studies’ collaboration in its organization as well as in the composition of individual essays. Each of the three sections comprising the collection begins with an introduction that outlines an Americas approach to the topics of History and the Literary Imagination, The Lives and Fictions of American Women, and Perspectives on Literary Criticism. Excavating the conjoined but disjunctive histories of English and Spanish projects, these introductions serve as skeletal frames contextualizing the individual essays. The editors make salient points about the shared histories of the Americas: that the Americas are distinctive in that they all experienced a revolutionary rupture with the colonizing power; that they are a stage of varying degrees of hybrid culture; and that their histories of slavery, indigenous cultures, national formation, and economic development interconnect as well as distinguish them from other geopolitical areas of the globe. The authors also make important distinctions between the...